WordPress 2.6

It’s about time I got around to doing this review. I ran the upgrade soon after finding out about the new release, but hadn’t gotten around to really checking it out until now.

The WP team were quick with this release – version 2.5 was released just a few months ago. And this release was about a month early! Then again, 2.6 seems more of an incremental update rather than a major upgrade, such as 2.0 and 2.5 were.

Below I’ve commented on some items of interest in the update – of interest to me anyway. A full list of features is available on the official posting.

Theme Preview

Preview a theme before activating

You used to be able to activate a theme in the Design panel just by clicking on the link or preview image. Now, clicking on the entry will bring up a display with a live preview of how your site will look like with the theme enabled. You can then activate the theme by clicking the Activate link in the top right of the preview display. Or you can abort by clicking the X in the top left corner.

It’s an extra step in the process, but I think it is more useful than a small preview image.

Plugins

Being that there were no serious changes to the WP API, or to the database schema, existing plugins should not be affected by upgrading WP to 2.6. Major releases, such as 2.5, involved API and database changes, so existing plugins needed to be updated to reflect the changes. Not so this time around – I use a number of plugins, and none of them were affected by this update.

Active plugins listing

The plugins page has been updated to show separate plugin lists depending on their status. In previous versions of WP, all plugins – whether active or inactive – were listed in the same list. Active plugins were made distinct by a different background colour.

In WP 2.6, there are separate lists used to show currently active plugins, recently active plugins, and inactive plugins. This is a little change, really, but it makes the meaning of the page more clear than it used to be.

Recently active and inactive plugins list

You can also now deactivate multiple plugins at once. Just check the boxes beside the plugins in the Active list, and click the Deactivate button above the list. The selected plugins will all be deactivated. You can also mass-activate inactive plugins using the Activate button above the Inactive list.

Post Revisions

This is something that will be useful. In the past, while working on a post or article, I would have found it useful to be able to track changes made during the process.

Listing of post revisions

At the bottom of the Write Post page is a new section: Post Revisions. The listing there is updated each time a post is saved. To see what text the post contained for a particular save point, click the link for that save point. You’ll be shown the version of the post at the time it was saved. Included here are the post title, author, content, and excerpt. Also indicated is the date/time when this version was saved.

Below this section is a listing of revisions to the post. Use the radio buttons to select the versions to compare. You can compare the latest (current) version to any other version, or you can compare any version of the post with any other. The radio button in the left column indicates the post that will appear on the left, while the other radio button is for the post that appears on the right.

Choose which revisions to compare

Make your choices, and click the Compare Revisions button. The two versions will appear side-by side. Unchanged text appears plain. Text that has been added in one revision has a green background, where removed text will have a red background.

A side-by-side comparison of two post revisions

In the revision listing, you can click the Restore link beside a revision to revert the post to that revision.

Interestingly, you can compare a revision of the post with the same revision. Normally, there’s not much point, as there will be no differences, but something interesting does happen when you do it. No damage will be done, so give it a try!

Conclusion

WordPress 2.6 is not a huge upgrade like 2.5 was, but it does bring some nice new features. I outlined some of the ones that I like above, and there is a full list on the WP site. There is also a short video demonstrating some of the new features, which is a good idea – it is good to see the features in action.

I personally think the revisions feature may be the most significant one for this release. It enables WP to be used more like a Content Management System or a Wiki, both of which were previously doable but a little tricky.